Nigel Parker's Outside Line

Nokia Lumia 800 Releasing in New Zealand… Why You Want One!

nparker — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:46:00 GMT

I spent almost $1,000 NZD (after tax and import duty) ordering a Nokia Lumia 800 pre-Christmas from the UK.

Since owning the Lumia it has become the greatest device I’ve ever owned (including my iPod touch, Kindle Fire and other Windows Phones) and I’ll get into the why very shortly.

The great news is that if you pre-register with Telecom NZ before the 22nd Feb you can get one of the awesome Nokia Lumia 800’s for $799 NZD on open term (that’s $230 less than the iPhone 4S)!

This phone replaced a lot of devices for me.

#1 In Car Navigation

The Nokia Drive app is beyond awesome. You can download maps and voices (with local points of interest) for offline 3D turn by turn navigation for whatever country you travel to for free! The app has been brilliant this week during our South Island trip as we explored a bunch of spots that we hadn’t visited before.

In comparison the TomTom New Zealand only app costs $95 on the iPhone and a Navman will set you back about $300.

#2 The Camera

The Nokia Lumia 800 comes with a Carl Zeiss Tessar lens and a 8 megapixel camera. I can finally say that the quality is good enough at both photos and video that I can leave my Panasonic Lumix at home!

The Lumia introduced a marco lens to Windows Phone (which is awesome). There was a problem with the default settings that Macro is turned on by default but a recent fix to the OS has fixed this.

Top Camera Tips:

Change the ISO to “200” and Contrast to “High” and save these as the default for the camera for best results.
Tap the screen to focus on an object in the scene and take the photo rather than using the camera button on the side of the device.
Use the Thumba Photo Editor app to apply colourization (Colour Selection), Vignette, HDR, Tilt-Shift effects.
Use the Pano app.

Here is a collection of photos I have taken with my Lumia.

If you have a Windows Phone why don’t you try a new wallpaper and theme? I have been sporting this photo I shot of the dry grass at sunset and the brown phone theme as a change to remind me of the barren land and majestic mountains of the South Island New Zealand summer.

#3 The Video

As long as you have steady hands the HD video recording on the phone is 2nd to none that I’ve seen.

#4 The Bumper Case

The Nokia Lumia 800 comes with a free rubber bumper case (this isn’t needed to improve signal quality it is just to stop bumps) compare this with the iPhone which costs $29 USD for the bumper case and this is needed for call quality improvements on the iPhone 4 model.

#5 Live Tiles Beat SpringBoard Layout Every Time

Let’s face it iOS introduced the SpringBoard icon layout four years ago. It has remained unchanged as a 4 x 4 grid. The great news is that unlike other platforms, Windows Phone doesn’t follow this draconian stagnant uniformity.

The NZ app ecosystem for Windows Phone is very healthy and live tile enabled local apps like Weather NZ, Auckland Traffic, Menu Mania and My Trips make it a pleasure to glance and get on with whatever you were doing beside what is faster than a Windows Phone :)

Nokia Amazing Everyday!

Webstock 2012 Less Than A Month Away

nparker — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 23:40:00 GMT

It has been almost 6 years since the first Webstock in Wellington, and I still remember fondly the inaugural conference.

What was memorable for me was the week that I spent with Tony Chor (then Group Program Manager for Internet Explorer) and his authentic and humble presentation on Internet Explorer.

In Webstock 2008 I got a chance to deliver a 5 minute presentation aptly titled ‘The Internet Is Not Private Get Over It!’

Looking back on this talk it is interesting to observe how much has changed in regards to social media and how much hasn’t.

In 2008 at Webstock both Verb and ourselves chose to create Photo Booths with our stands something that was not lost on the expressive attendees! We took the low tech approach with Playing Cards, a camera, a Vegas backdrop and a MIX08 Valentines theme. While Verb built and entire digital, flickr enable photo booth in .NET!

The results on the day complemented each other quite well.

At Webstock 2010 I tried something different and covered the stories of Webstock from behind the scenes.The highlight of this for me was Adam Greenfield (from 2008 to 2010 he was Nokia's head of design direction for user interface and services) and his Wellington Webstock Walkshop. Check out his presentation on public spaces.

With less than a month to go until Webstock 2012 I am really looking forward to the return to New Zealand of two high profile Microsoft employees.

Scott Hanselman (Microsoft Principal Community Architect for the Web Platform) and danah boyd (Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research).

If you are .NET web developer in NZ you absolutely must scoop up one of the last tickets to attend Scott’s workshop ASP.NET MVC: From Baby Ninja to slightly older and more competent Ninja. At ($375 or $495 w/ Webstock Ticket) this IMO is the best value training you’ll get to grow in awesomeness at your chosen profession.

danah boyd (named "High Priestess of the Internet" by the Financial Times) is one of the world's foremost experts on the culture of technology. She features on the latest cover of Fast Company where she talks about Generation Flux.

She argues that the best place "to create steel walls is in businesses outside your core cash cows. The role of a big company is to keep the cash cow rolling, and then build the new."

If you haven’t got your ticket to Webstock yet register before the late bird kicks in on Monday the 23rd Jan.

Share Link Task with Metrotube and Windows Phone 7

nparker — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 22:56:00 GMT

The LazywormApps team down in Christchurch are a Microsoft BizSpark Start-Up and are one of the most successful Windows Phone 7 development companies in New Zealand.

In the first year their LazyTube application achieved 184,346 downloads. Since then after 4 months of design, development and testing they have released the incredible new Metrotube application. In it’s first two weeks Metrotube became one of the top 20 paid WP7 apps in the US (currently #12).

After communicating with these guys since the launch of WP7 last week when I was in Christchurch I finally met with Atta and Michael (the team behind Metrotube). I am extremely impressed with the incredible commitment that these guys have made to Windows Phone 7 and their application. They have worked on it outside their day jobs of building WPF applications and have refined and taken feedback from their users to make what is possibly the best YouTube experience on any platform!

In my mind this is an excellent example of what happens when you add passion with an incredible development platform and a gap in the market.

“Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

Another thing I noticed when I was down in Christchurch is how the guys are keeping on top of the announcements around Windows 8 Metro Style apps and how they have brought the function of the sharing charm into Metrotube (See it in Action).

I showed this at the Metro Meetup in Auckland last week and since most developers hadn’t seen it I thought it was worthy of a post.

Check out How to: Use the Share Link Task for Windows Phone to find out how to use the new "Mango" ShareLinkTask Launcher in Windows Phone 7.5.

No more battling with OAuth to get Twitter and Facebook integration in your Windows Phone apps!

Keep an eye on these guys as I feel that they will really be going places!

UPDATE:

The only constant is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.
— Isaac Asimov

In less than 10 days Metro Tube will be no more.

Only a week ago I was thinking how nice it was to also have an official YouTube App on my XBOX that felt like Metro. All I can say is that I hope Google see this for the opportunity that it is.

For all of the Windows Phone users out there go buy MetroTube in the next 10 days and give these guys some money! Let’s see if we can close this app out as the #1 Paid App in the US marketplace on New Year’s Eve!

UPDATE 2: There are lots of comments on this on WP Central

WebMatrix Start Building Better Websites

nparker — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 05:04:00 GMT

Since the launch of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer there have been almost 2 million downloads of the 5 most popular applications. This made me curious to find out a bit more about what applications modern web developers are using to build for the web. This afternoon I tried my hand at installing and testing out some of the most popular applications in the gallery.

WebMatrix

Watch: WebMatrix: uber geek in designer clothes

“Visual Studio 2010 looks like a dashboard. It's big and powerful and overwhelming. I tried to get my wife, then later my 10 year old nephew to make a website and it was a non-starter. It worked later with WebMatrix. This isn't for professionals, even though it has components that professionals will use. Pros will like a free file-based SQL Server, and a non-service version of IIS that's more compatible than the Visual Web Developer, and pros might like using Razor as an alternative View Engine for their ASP.NET MVC sites… read more

Here are some interesting WebMatrix tutorials that I uncovered:

You may have heard the news that Scott Hanselman is coming back to New Zealand next Feb to speak at Webstock. Scott has written a cool post on WebMatrix and node.js: The easiest way to get started with node on Windows.

Umbraco CMS 346,364 downloads

Terabyte was the 1st Umbraco CMS certified partner in Australasia they have a huge portfolio of sites created using this popular CMS. I particularly like their redesign of the flava website. bka Interactive, NV Interactive and Datacom also build a number of their websites using Umbraco. Check out Ben from bka’s recent post on Umbraco. Also check out the beta of the redesigned ASP.NET website at http://beta.asp.net. The new site is built on Umbraco check the post on Scott Hanselman's blog for more detail.

Try Umbraco for yourself it only takes a few minutes to get it set up.

Kentico CMS 133,593 downloads

There are currently 8 Kentico partners in New Zealand. Keith Patton from MARKER in Auckland blogs regularly on the technical aspects of the platform. Richard Wright from Federation Media in Auckland shares his view on the Faceoff Between Umbraco and Kentico at Tech.Ed NZ 2010.

Join WebsiteSpark with Kentico Software in New Zealand and get a Free License of Kentico CMS Professional Edition.

SilverStripe CMS 83,871 downloads

Wellington based SilverStripe CMS became the first ever open source web app to become Microsoft Certified.

My favourite third party observation on this to date has been written by Scott Dahlgren over at thevarguy.com:

“For companies like SilverStripe, being aligned with a company like Microsoft creates huge momentum and opens up new markets and new customers that were not available before. For the end user, there is freedom to chose the best solution that fits your need. On the surface is seems like a win-win-win. I just hope it stays that way.

If you haven’t already check out SilverStripe on the Web Platform Installer… read more

WordPress 480,514 downloads

WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world.

In this Video, Laurence Moroney, Microsoft shows you how to create a web site using WebMatrix and WordPress in just under 20 minutes!

nopCommerce 226,473 downloads

So far in this post I have focused mainly on CMS solutions. One of the pleasant little surprises I came across this afternoon in my experimenting was nopCommerce. nopCommerce is a secure, scalable and extendable e-commerce platform. It has user friendly administration tools to manage your storefront, customers, wish lists, discounts, and coupons. It also has flexible tax support, multi-lingual support, and hundreds of other features. Support for the most popular gateways: Authorize.net, PayPal, Google Checkout, and more. nopCommerce also runs in Medium Trust. Give it a try.

Composite C1 CMS 12,986 downloads

The new kid on the block - Composite C1 is a fully featured - free open source - web content management system developed for and by web professionals. Front-end and XSLT developers are highly empowered and able to control website look and feel down to minute detail. ASP.NET, Razor and .NET 4 developers have the latest technologies, a pluggable architecture and full LINQ data access at their disposal. A very flexible architecture, easy Windows Azure migration, both XML and SQL Server support, a lot of free easy-to-install add-ons. Give it a try.

Drop me a note in the comments if you’ve used any of these recently to build websites in New Zealand.

ASP.NET vNext

nparker — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 21:41:37 GMT

Previously Mike wrote a great editorial about all things //BUILD I'd like to re-iterate that developers who are looking to build apps for Windows 8 can check out a wealth of content on the BUILD website, the new Windows Dev Center, and Channel 9. That said, Windows 8 isn't going to be the subject of this week's editorial. I'd like to talk about the enhancements to the Microsoft Web Platform that has also happened over the last month.

The first thing to call out is the beta of the beta launch of a redesigned ASP.NET website at http://beta.asp.net. The new site is built on Umbraco and if you'd like to provide feedback please check the post on Scott Hanselman's blog.

During Scott Guthrie's //BUILD keynote, Scott announced the availability of ASP.NET MVC 4 developer preview. Note those words, developer preview. This is a pre-beta release so proceed with caution.

Scott has started an ASP.NET vNext Series of posts and Phil Haack spoke at the //BUILD conference on building mobile web applications with ASP.NET MVC 4. In his talk, he demonstrated a recipe that he wrote to automate the process of creating mobile versions of desktop views.

Speaking of mobile with the roll out of Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango" it may be a good time to start thinking about IE9 mobile as a target for your web applications. Check out this //BUILD session building optimized websites and using the web browser control with IE9.

For those of you that are enjoying the light weight nature of Web Matrix (check out this post on Re-writing a 5 year old WebForms application as an ASP.NET Web Pages application with Razor) the WebMatrix 2 beta is now available for download.

RWC 2011 By The Numbers

nparker — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 20:57:23 GMT

I was ten years old when my dad took me to watch the final of the inaugural Rugby World Cup in Auckland in 1987 in two days time I am going to go full circle and travel to the final at Eden Park to watch New Zealand do battle with France once again.

Twenty Four years on unfortunately my Dad is no longer with us but I have been able to take my 5 year old daughter Indigo to Eden Park to experience some of the magic that is Rugby World Cup 2011 in New Zealand.

As a rugby mad New Zealander I have been proud to work on some of the technology that has supported this great tournament. At the Tech.Ed NZ keynote I talked about the video platform that sits behind the Rugby World Cup 2011 event (50 mins in). With 46 matches played and 2 to go, take a moment to look back and check out some of the 61 hours of incredible tournament rugby available to us free of charge on the Rugby World Cup official website!

The IRB have also just released the official stats for the digital solutions on their website

The official mobile application was downloaded more than 3 million times
More than 17 million video clips viewed on the official RWC 2011 mobile app!
Page impressions on the official mobile application outnumber rugbyworldcup.com by a factor of 3:1
More than 5 million video clips have been viewed (in Silverlight) on the website at rugbyworldcup.com

Rugby World Cup Head of Communications Dominic Rumbles said: “The Rugby World Cup 2011 digital offering has been one of the success stories of what has been an exceptional Rugby World Cup. In partnership with the Rugby New Zealand 2011 organising body we have provided an integrated platform that is easily accessible for fans from around the world, while generating maximum promotion of the event.”

“We are delighted with the record numbers of fans that have become involved in Rugby’s showcase event, even though they may not have been able to make it to New Zealand.”

Here is an interview I gave with Dominic Rumbles on Radio Sport before the start of the tournament.

Check out the Microsoft New Zealand Rugby World Cup 2011 sponsorship page.

Read the DeltaTre press release – “In the first two weeks of the Tournament there were nearly ten million unique visitors from more than 200 countries”

Final

Date	Home	Result	Away	Venue	Match Video
23-Oct-11	France	7-8	New Zealand	Auckland	Replay

Bronze Final

Date	Home	Result	Away	Venue	Match Video
21-Oct-11	Wales	18-21	Australia	Auckland	Replay

Semi Finals

Date	Home	Result	Away	Venue	Match Video
16-Oct-11	Australia	6 - 20	New Zealand	Auckland	Replay
15-Oct-11	Wales	8 - 9	France	Auckland	Replay

Quarter Finals

Date	Home	Result	Away	Venue	Match Video
8-Oct-11	Ireland	10 - 22	Wales	Wellington	Replay
8-Oct-11	England	12 - 19	France	Auckland	Replay
9-Oct-11	South Africa	9 - 11	Australia	Wellington	Replay
9-Oct-11	New Zealand	33 - 10	Argentina	Auckland	Replay

Pool Play

Date	Home	Result	Away	Venue	Match Video
9-Sep-11	New Zealand	41 - 10	Tonga	Auckland	Replay
10-Sep-11	France	47 - 21	Japan	Auckland	Replay
10-Sep-11	Scotland	34 - 24	Romania	Invercargill	Replay
10-Sep-11	Argentina	9 - 13	England	Dunedin	Replay
10-Sep-11	Fiji	49 - 25	Namibia	Rotorua	Replay
11-Sep-11	Australia	32 - 6	Italy	Auckland	Replay
11-Sep-11	Ireland	22 - 10	USA	New Plymouth	Replay
11-Sep-11	South Africa	17 - 16	Wales	Wellington	Replay
14-Sep-11	Tonga	20 - 25	Canada	Whangarei	Replay
14-Sep-11	Scotland	15 - 6	Georgia	Invercargill	Replay
14-Sep-11	Samoa	49 - 12	Namibia	Rotorua	Replay
15-Sep-11	Russia	6 - 13	USA	New Plymouth	Replay
16-Sep-11	New Zealand	83 - 7	Japan	Hamilton	Replay
17-Sep-11	Argentina	43 - 8	Romania	Invercargill	Replay
17-Sep-11	Australia	6 - 15	Ireland	Auckland	Replay
17-Sep-11	South Africa	49 - 3	Fiji	Wellington	Replay
18-Sep-11	France	46 - 19	Canada	Napier	Replay
18-Sep-11	England	41 - 10	Georgia	Dunedin	Replay
18-Sep-11	Wales	17 - 10	Samoa	Hamilton	Replay
20-Sep-11	Italy	53 - 17	Russia	Nelson	Replay
21-Sep-11	Tonga	31 - 18	Japan	Whangarei	Replay
22-Sep-11	South Africa	87 - 0	Namibia	Auckland	Replay
23-Sep-11	Australia	67 - 5	USA	Wellington	Replay
24-Sep-11	New Zealand	37 - 17	France	Auckland	Replay
24-Sep-11	England	67 - 3	Romania	Dunedin	Replay
25-Sep-11	Argentina	13 - 12	Scotland	Wellington	Replay
25-Sep-11	Ireland	62 - 12	Russia	Rotorua	Replay
25-Sep-11	Fiji	7 - 27	Samoa	Auckland	Replay
26-Sep-11	Wales	81 - 7	Namibia	New Plymouth	Replay
27-Sep-11	Canada	23 - 23	Japan	Napier	Replay
27-Sep-11	Italy	27 - 10	USA	Nelson	Replay
28-Sep-11	Georgia	25 - 9	Romania	Palmerston North	Replay
30-Sep-11	South Africa	13 - 5	Samoa	Auckland	Replay
1-Oct-11	France	14 - 19	Tonga	Wellington	Replay
1-Oct-11	England	16 - 12	Scotland	Auckland	Replay
1-Oct-11	Australia	68 - 22	Russia	Nelson	Replay
2-Oct-11	New Zealand	79 - 15	Canada	Wellington	Replay
2-Oct-11	Argentina	25 - 7	Georgia	Palmerston North	Replay
2-Oct-11	Ireland	36 - 6	Italy	Dunedin	Replay
2-Oct-11	Wales	66 - 0	Fiji	Hamilton	Replay

How to Navigate the HTML5 Video Maze

nparker — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 20:18:00 GMT

I am constantly being asked by web developers how they can get started with HTML5 Video.

My first question is normally: Why do you want to use it? What problem are you trying to solve?

More often than not the answer comes back as: I want my video to play on mobile devices.

When you break it down to these simple terms it is much easier to come up with a suggestion on how to get started.

In most cases video content already exists in one format or another.

Previously I wrote about the back story behind the HTML5 video codecs and why I believe H.264 is the clear leader in actual adoption on the web. A year and a half on I’d say that very little has changed. You still need to support a couple of codecs to be compatible with the full suite of modern desktop and mobile browsers but it is up to you as content creator to choose how far you want to go when encoding your video content.

Take a look at the IE Test Drive Video Format support page to see some examples of how this works across the different browsers.

What this means in reality is that on desktop browsers web developers are generally happy to leave their existing solution in place to play their pre-existing video/audio content using plugins. They will then supplement this with the HTML5 Video and Audio tag if the browser is able to play their particular codec of choice natively. In my experience I have found that on the current most popular mobile platforms H.264, AAC and MP3 are generally well supported using the HTML5 video and audio tags and this is the format that the majority of people have their content in already.

How Do You Get Started?

The Microsoft Media Platform (MMP) frameworks are the glue that holds together individual pieces of the Microsoft end-to-end media solution. They save time, development cost and nerves. I have worked on a number of large scale projects that are based on the MMP; most recently the video platform that sits behind the upcoming Rugby World Cup 2011 event (50 mins in). Check out the Full Replay of the All Blacks v Tonga Match from Rugby World Cup 2011.

The Microsoft Media Platform: Player Framework (that is licensed for commercial use under the Microsoft Public License Ms-PL) has recently added a preview of support for HTML5 (Demo) that enables you as web developers to compliment the Silverlight player framework with a HTML5 video experience that enables you to reach additional mobile platforms.

Also there are a number of commercial solutions available that do all the work for you. I think two that are particularly good are JW Player™ (licensed for commercial use) and SublimeVideo® (Player as a Service).

What if You Want to Roll Your Own Player?

It is surprisingly easy to role your own video solution using the default browser controls and codecs that the browser supports. The markup below shows what you need to play a video in HTML5 with a “Fall Back” to an unlisted video on YouTube. For examples like this I tend to use WebMatrix as a lightweight IDE for building HTML5 mark-up.

Demo

Common Gotchas

1. Video MIME types

Set these on the server
Azure Storage Explorer also allows you to do this on individual files.
Update ~~application/octet-stream~~to one of the following:
- .mp4 - “video/mp4″
- .m4v - “video/m4v”
- .webm - “video/webm”
- .ogg - “application/ogg”
- .ogv - “video/ogg”
Set these in the web.config

2. <video>Fall-Back</video>

Fall-back content (like the YouTube example above) is only displayed by browsers that do not support the <video> tag.
If the browser supports the video tag but cannot play any of the media types that you have requested the fall-back code won’t fire. In this case you need to use JavaScript to detect this scenario using the canPlayType() method and provide fall-back content as shown in the example below.

Demo

3. Byte Range Requests (seeking)

Content should be served from a HTTP 1.1-compatible web server to enable seek ahead to the end of the video.
If you server is not HTTP 1.1-compatible (e.g. Azure Storage) you must encode the video with key index frames in the file & not at the end so that seek ahead still works. The “H.264 YouTube HD” profile in Expression Encoder 4 Pro does this.
Also note that if the video file is gzipped seeking won’t work. Since with most codecs the video/audio data is already compressed, gzip/deflate won't actually save you much bandwidth anyway.
IIS also supports Bit Rate Throttling to save you bandwidth on the server side when delivering video content.

Real World Example

Last week at Tech·Ed New Zealand I presented a session with Gus and Zach from NV Interactive about a new video analysis system that they are building for New Zealand Cricket.

The existing solution uses video in the wmv format and displays in a browser using the Windows Media Plugin. This solution isn’t really supported cross platform and it definitely doesn’t work on mobile devices.

NV Interactive has chosen to use H.264 and MediaElement.js to extend their video experience across a greater number of users and devices. Like the other commercial players I have mentioned above MediaElement.js uses the same HTML/CSS for all players meaning that the HTML5 and Flash player experience looks the same for all users. It is also worth noting that MediaElement.js is licensed under GPLv2/MIT meaning that any enhancements that you make to the source code also need to be shared.

Watch the video of the solution that they are developing (to display this video I have used H.264 Main Profile 1080p w/ fallback to H.264 Baseline Profile 480p for mobile devices using CSS3 Media Queries, if the browser does not support H.264 I have fallen back to an unlisted video on YouTube - View Source on the page to see the code that I've used).

Where Does HTML5 Video Need to Go?

There are currently a few key areas not addressed by the current W3C Video Standard (full screen support, live streaming, real time communication, content protection, metadata and accessibility). Recently the W3C Web and TV Workshop discussed some of these areas and offered some early thinking on how they may be adopted as web standards in the future.

The big one for me is a solution for live and adaptive streaming. Currently there are three proprietary solutions that support live and adaptive streaming.

Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) is currently in Draft International Standard. It looks likely that it will get W3C support if it is offered royalty free.

DASH supports:

Live, on-demand and time-shifted content delivery and trick modes
Splicing and ad insertion
Byte-range requests
Content descriptors for protection, accessibility and rating

What about Real Time Communications?

HTML5Labs is where Microsoft prototypes early and unstable specifications from web standards bodies such as W3C. Sharing these prototypes helps Microsoft have informed discussions with developer communities to provide better feedback on draft specifications based on this implementation experience.

On the labs site Microsoft has released a Media Capture Audio Prototype that implements the audio portion of this W3C specification. Their next prototype will support Speech recognition and will implement the Microsoft proposal available on the W3C website. Then, after that, the labs team will deliver another update to the Media Capture prototype that will add video capture capabilities.

In Conclusion

If you are hosting progressive download video and audio on the web you should be looking to support HTML5 video and audio today to extend the reach of your content.

More Resources

At the MIX conference in Las Vegas earlier in the year I gave a presentation titled 5 Things You Need to Know to Start Using <video> and <audio> Today.
Simon Pieters - Everything you need to know about HTML5 video and audio
Dive Into HTML5 - Video On The Web
HTML5 - Internet Explorer 9 Guide for Developers - video and audio Elements

WDCNZ–HTML Media: Where We Are & Where We Need To Go

nparker — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 03:55:53 GMT

Last week I presented at WDCNZ in Wellington with Chris Double (Auckland based Mozilla Developer who works on HTML 5 video & audio support in Firefox).

Back in March I delivered a presentation at the MIX conference in Las Vegas titled 5 Things You Need to Know to Start Using <video> and <audio> Today. Coincidently in the airport in San Francisco on the way back into NZ I ran into Chris Double and other members of the Firefox NZ team. Chris and I got talking about the video and audio capability in HTML 5 and I pitched the idea of doing a presentation together at WDCNZ based on the idea that there is a lot of common ground when it comes to implementing web standards.

I have included the slides below and will link to the video of the session if and when it is made available.

HTML Media: Where We Are & Where We Need To Go

View more presentations from Nigel Parker.

Adobe Issues Flash Player Fix for IE9 Users Experiencing Issues

nparker — Mon, 30 May 2011 03:07:10 GMT

Last week Adobe broke the Internet. What they did was push an upgrade to their Flash plugin to version 10.3 that made it impossible to view and consume Flash content for Windows 7 + IE9 + Intel HD Graphics users!

This affected ~80% of the computers at Microsoft New Zealand.

See the screenshots below for what the NZ Herald site looked like for people after they upgraded Flash.

If you have been affected and you are wondering how to fix it you have two choices.

Roll back to a 10.2 version of Flash
Install the pre-release fix from Adobe.

Adobe have admitted that they are at fault:

As there are many configurations and driver combinations that we don’t have in our testing lab, your feedback is important to ensure we have a good resolution.

But the part I don’t get is how a common configuration that encompasses hundreds of millions of machines worldwide isn’t in Adobe’s testing lab!

Unfortunately many users have been left clueless as to what is going wrong.

Update: I have received multiple reports that the pre-release fix Adobe issued doesn’t work.

I recommend un-installing Flash and installing

(Released 4/15/2011) Flash Player 10.2.159.1 (66.3 MB)

at least until Adobe sort themselves out. Let them know if the fix isn’t working for you here.

Update 2: Yesterday Adobe released 10.3.181.16 try this to see if it fixes the problem.

(Released 5/31/2011) Flash Player 10.3.181.16 (6.3 MB)

Light Up Your Website with Windows 7 and IE9

nparker — Sun, 29 May 2011 22:59:57 GMT

Whether you buy into the numbers or not it is promising to see that StatCounter is now reporting Windows 7 to be the most popular operating system in New Zealand with 1/3 of all NZ computers running Windows 7.

In addition to this 341,804 unique users visited http://msn.co.nz this month using Internet Explorer 9, that is ~127k more users than Chrome (all versions), ~200k more users than Firefox 4 and ~290k more users than Safari (all versions) (source nielsen SiteCensus May 2011).

With these numbers I think now is a good time to start looking at how to “light-up” your website with IE9 on Windows 7.

Take a lead from Trade Me, they have done an awesome job of providing a custom jump list for their website.

As has Geekzone with their styli black chrome and navigation buttons.

So what do you need to do?

create a hi-res favicon
set up notifications
build a dynamic Jump List

Check out http://BuildMyPinnedSite.com

In fact sites from 37 countries reaching 1,000,000,000 active web users have built a pinned site.

Check out Adding the Awesomesauce Flavor with Internet Explorer 9 Pinned Sites

By now, you’ve heard about pinned sites in Internet Explorer 9. And, you’ve probably even used them yourself. But, did you know that this feature can help increase site visits and engagements by as much as 50%? In this session, you’ll hear stories of Pinned Site implementations by some of the most popular websites on the web today. You’ll also discover how to support pinned sites with a few lines of markup. Finally, you’ll learn best practices that will help you deliver an awesome experience to your visitors.

Besides if you don’t create a high res fav icon your site will look rubbish when pinned on Windows 7.

Let me know in the comments when you’ve pinned yours.

Release an App for Windows Phone 7 in 7 Days for a Chance to Win a New HTC 7 Trophy Phone

nparker — Mon, 16 May 2011 00:58:00 GMT

UPDATE: Congratulations to Arraybracket Limited – Fill ‘Er Up for winning the random draw! Thank you for everyone who entered the competition. A great selection of apps have been released as a result.

The following 29 linked apps made it into the draw, there are currently 6 other applications that have failed certification and 5 that are pending certification.

Following on from The Great Kiwi Windows Azure Competition I got a taste for the 10 hour app. I started looking across other areas where I have been procrastinating. This lead me to Windows Phone 7, despite having a phone and also having a developer account for the marketplace I hadn’t built and released my own app! I invested 10 hrs over the last couple of weeks and have now released my first app.

What I want from you: I did a quick check on the number of apps released by NZ developers and discovered that we currently have 95 123 applications in the marketplace. I’ve been saying for months that I want to break the magic 100 mark and I figured it was time for me to put some flesh in the game.

The Challenge: Finish, build and release your app in 7 days and be in to win a new HTC 7 Trophy Phone!

1. Contact me through this blog and if you convince me that you are based in New Zealand (e.g. give me a phone number for me to call you on) I’ll give you a token to get a free one year membership in the Windows Phone 7 marketplace. Do this first as it takes a number of business days to confirm your identity and access your account.

2. Download and install the phone tools (be prepared to have this process run in the background for up to an hour).

3. Build and/or finish that WP7 app that you’ve been working on or meaning to create!

4. Release it to the marketplace!

5. I will collect all the apps released into the marketplace by NZ developers (excluding Microsoft employees and their families) from today Monday 16th May until Monday the 6th June 2011 (the extra time is so you can get your account setup and activated and also enable you to fail certification a couple of times but still be able to enter the draw).

6. From the applications I get I will draw the phone winner at random and announce the winner here on the 7th June 2011. Good Luck!

If you are the sort of person that is short of ideas here are a few:

The Ian Randall – Because Ian told me he would build an app if he had a good idea.
- Title – Are the Warriors Playing?
- Launches a page with the word’s Yes or No in it.
- Check out Using Windows Azure for Windows Phone 7 Push Notification Support
- Push people a notification an hour before the warriors play their next game and the result of the game at the end.
The RSS App - Many NZ sites have RSS feeds available
- http://www.eventfinder.co.nz/feed/events/auckland/whatson/upcoming.rss
- http://rss.nzherald.co.nz/rss/xml/nzhrsscid_000000002.xml
- http://www.stuff.co.nz/rss/
- Check out the http://followmyfeed.net app generator

My Idea: Group buy and daily deal sites are invading New Zealand in mass with every man and his dog is launching one. I figured it would be worthwhile building a simple REST service on an Azure Extra Small instance to act as an aggregator then build a WP7 mobile app to display all the deals together in one place.

The Process: The project took me under 10 hours from idea to delivery.

1. Earlier last year I built a couple of sample apps for Trade Me that used the REST based read only API that Trade Me created for the Windows Vista Launch Gadget back in 2007. I started with my source code from that WP7 project.
2. I built the .NET 4 WCF REST Service, and used BLOB storage serialization caching to speed things up.
3. I released my On Sale in Auckland application to the marketplace.

I got the Buzz:

After releasing the app (within my 10 hour self imposed timeframe) I was motivated to enhance the app and release another version that supports more cites in New Zealand and takes advantage of the panorama control. Enter On Sale in New Zealand, this app took 2 hours yesterday to build from my existing services and is currently being tested for marketplace release.

Getting Over the Line: I have noticed other kiwi WP7 apps getting close to shipping hopefully the chance of winning a new phone will push some developers to publish their apps. I’m looking at you @rushdigital.

The Great Kiwi Windows Azure Competition

nparker — Mon, 02 May 2011 05:00:00 GMT

The Problem: Lots of kiwi developers are signing up to try Windows Azure but are not actually deploying anything.

To understand why this is we have talked with a bunch of local developers to get a feel for what the barriers are to getting started.

The two most common responses we received are:

Windows Azure is too expensive
After I signed up and logged into the portal I didn’t know what to do next

OK, I’ll start with Problem #1. When Windows Azure first came out the cheapest offering for the smallest supported instance was quite a bit more than other cloud offerings. Also it wasn’t just about it being expensive it was also the point that pay as you go scared people as they didn’t have a fixed cost that they new they would be charged each month. We have changed this recently by introducing and Extra Small instance and increasing the “Free” threshold in our introduction and MSDN offerings and introducing fixed price subscription offers.

What options do you have today?

Try Windows Azure Free without a credit card at http://windowsazurepass.com (if you are in New Zealand contact us for a Promo Code) - expect a two day turn around and this is a great way to enter the comp below.
Sign Up to the Free Trial Introductory Special to build and deploy a small solution. Until the 30th September you get the following for free (full details):
1. 750 hours of an Extra Small compute instance (you can remote desktop into your instance!) – enough for a single instance to be deployed full time.
2. SQL Azure 1GB Web Edition database (free for first 3 months only)
3. 20GB in & out per month
Activate your MSDN Subscriber Benefits (full details) to get up to $3,100 in annual benefits.
If you have a company that is
1. Developing software (including software as a service and phone apps)
2. Privately Held
3. Less than 3 years old
4. Making less than $1 Million USD annually
5. Sign Up to Biz Spark for no money up front – to unlock up to Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN + Azure for each developer in your start-up for up to three years.

I myself have signed up for a Free Trial Introductory Special and I have my MVC3 website that I built for MIX11 running on a single extra small instance.

Moving on to Problem #2 –

First we looked at what Microsoft in the US has built to address this problem - The Rock Paper Azure Challenge – this concept and competition are great and we have had more than 20 kiwi devs that have entered which is a very good response. The challenge with this solution is you need to spend quite a bit of time to understand the “Rock Paper Azure” bot code and enhance it to compete. Because of this we didn’t feel the broad pool of NZ developers would have the time to invest to get the result required.

This is where the creative thinking comes in. With this I’m really excited to introduce a little project I have been working on.

Meet http://be.1tri.be – The Great Kiwi Windows Azure Competition

It took me about 11 hours to take this project from idea to completed execution. The idea behind it is simple.

I built a ASP.NET MVC 3 Web Project that runs on Windows Azure (the back-end services are .NET 4 WCF/REST w/ SQL Server)
I give you the compiled package ready to deploy and the source code.
You deploy the site to your Windows Azure account to enter the competition.

If you are not using a Free TriaL Azure Account you can delete the package after you've entered the competition. Having the package deployed in production or staging will eat into your Azure hours as it is two extra small instances.

By visiting http://be.1tri.be you can see how many entries there are in the competition draw in real time and where everyone's favourite places in New Zealand are. I also added a extra feature that shows the best photos from Flickr around the point of interest when you click on the pins in the map.

After a developer enters I then hope that they will:

Let me know what you think and get your pin/entry in before the first draw next week for your best chance of winning prizes. At the time of writing there are 8 entries in the comp.

Also check out the Windows Azure Sessions from MIX below:

5 Things You Need to Know to Start Using Video and Audio Today

nparker — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 09:51:55 GMT

I have just finished giving my presentation at MIX11 on HTML5 Video and Audio. I enjoyed the session and promised to share the video, demos and code here on my blog.

5 Things You Need to Know to Start Using Video and Audio Today

Download PDF Slides (2.12MB)

My Demos are as follows (for most you need a browser that supports HTML5 – I recommend IE9 or IE10 PP1)

http://video.stickon.me/
http://video.stickon.me/Azure
http://video.stickon.me/Seek (Watch the full video of my session – Seek ahead, IIS, Akamai CDN, mp4 & ogg, Fall back to You Tube – F11 full windows video)
http://video.stickon.me/Split (Firework Interactive Video Demo)
http://video.stickon.me/CSS
http://video.stickon.me/Custom – Custom Controls
http://video.stickon.me/Fallback – Fall-back to Silverlight

I also built the demo using MVC3, Razor & the new HTML5 site template and hosted the site on Windows Azure using an extra small instance.

The Expression Encoder 4 High Profile H.264 profile that I demoed in my session is at http://vid.blob.core.windows.net/mix/MP4HighPresent.xml (right click save target as)

The recording of the MIX presentation is available online now as well.

Enjoy!

Awesome-sauce MIX 11 Day Two

nparker — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 09:12:00 GMT

2011 MICROSOFT IMAGINE CUP FESTIVAL, AUCKLAND, 12th APRIL (Next Tuesday)

nparker — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 20:20:49 GMT

2011 MICROSOFT IMAGINE CUP FESTIVAL

AUCKLAND, 12^th APRIL

Join us at the 2011 Microsoft Imagine Cup Festival and be inspired by our next generation of IT Professionals. This year you will have an opportunity to meet some of the most passionate and creative students building real technology solutions to problems we face today. Fighting mosquitos using lasers, using brain waves to control lights and appliances, and unmanned helicopters to help deliver aid, are just some of the innovative ideas you will see at this year’s competition.

The Microsoft Imagine Cup is a global student technology competition that encourages students to tackle the toughest problems facing the world today whilst applying the latest technologies. More than 1500 students have participated in this year’s New Zealand competition.

Attend the showcase for a vibrant marketplace style exhibition of the top 20 teams. Then watch the finals as the top 4 teams compete for the winning spot. Lastly, celebrate with the teams and network with the ICT industry at the Microsoft Imagine Cup Festival Party. There will also be over 100 spot prizes up for grabs, including 2 XBOX Kinect's and a Windows Phone 7 Device, so reserve your seat today!

Come on down and support your local Teams.

Agenda

3pm – 4:30pm:	Showcase
5pm – 7pm:	Finals Ceremony Hosted by NZ Comedian Ben Hurley
7pm – 9pm:	Festival Party with DJ General Lee

University of Auckland Business School
Owen G Glenn Building
12 Grafton Road
Auckland, New Zealand
12 April 2011
Free to attend, register now.

Regards

The New Zealand Microsoft Imagine Cup Team

Auckland Startup Weekend #AKLSW April 1-3

nparker — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 20:46:00 GMT

I want to call out what an awesome job Mike did with NZ’s first Startup Weekend #AKLSW. He was there for the entire 54 hours over the weekend and helped deliver a killer event. The event was sponsored by Microsoft and the ecentre in part to build awareness for http://bizspark.com and startups in NZ. The event was organized by Mike, Jason Armishaw, Yvonne McLaren (Valentine Addis - Venture catalyst) and Nick Shewring (The Biz Dojo).

I spent some time at the event as a mentor on Sat afternoon (where I shot a short video) and again on Sun evening for the pitches. I was impressed with the energy and quality of the teams taking part.

I was particularly impressed with http://taxisurfer.com @TaxiSurfer (who took out the competition), hat tip to Keith who ensured that the backend was .NET and REST not SOAP services.

It was also great to finally meet the @TouchManiacs guys who teamed up with @Nigelsampson to build the .NET MVC site and WP7 app for Hotspot who placed 3^rd at the event. Check out their video!

Jason Armishaw was on AMI Business at 6:20am this morning talking about the outcomes from the event (watch the clip) also 90seconds.tv were filming the finale so look out for their clip from the event.

MSDN Unplugged - The Unnamed Package of Web Love

nparker — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 02:59:00 GMT

I previously posted the links to all the demos that I gave during my unplugged talk around New Zealand last week.

As promised I will now post the videos and walk trough for the rest of the content.

Below is the PowerPoint presentation and demo script that I followed to step through the MVC3 Fundamentals demo.

As mentioned previously the WebCamps.ms site contains more demos, labs and source code.

I also talked about the Free Windows Azure trial until June 30th including 750 hours per month of Extra Small Compute Instance and 1G Web Edition SQL Azure database. I also showed how to publish an ASP.NET MVC 3 App to Windows Azure.

I then demonstrated how to Install and Publish an Orchard site using WebMatrix, I showed a list of hosters that support WebMatrix and ASP.NET 4 today. And demonstrated a http://nigel.akl.co.nz – WebMatrix, MVC 3 + SQL Server hosted at http://thecloud.net.nz who are planning to offer shared hosting in NZ via WebMatrix in the coming weeks.

I then introduced Internet Explorer 9 and showed some demonstrations and speed tests (video below and online).

I then extended my MVC 3 demo to include site pinning in IE9 (video below and online).

and finally I provided a comprehensive overview of HTML5 Video (video below and online) and demonstrated how to include it in your own web applications.

Download the full session video, Right click “Save target as…” MP4 or view the full session on Channel 9

As mentioned previously the full set of links are as follows:

Training Resources:

http://webcamps.ms – HOL’s, presentations and training

http://www.asp.net/mvc/pluralsight – Web Platform Video Training (free until March 18th)

http://microsoft/web (Web Platform Installer)

http://www.asp.net/WebMatrix

A Lap Around Web Matrix

Windows Azure Free Trial

Windows Azure MSDN Benefits

How To Publish an ASP.NET MVC 3 App to Windows Azure

RC of Entity Framework 4.1 (which includes EF Code First)

HTML5 & CSS3 in Visual Studio 2010 SP1

Expression Web 4 SP1 – HTML5 / CSS3 Support

http://ie9.co.nz – Get IE9

ie9ify

IE9 Developer Tools: Network Tab

Comparing 3D Graphics Capabilities Of Internet Explorer 9 And Chrome 11

Chrome 10 vs. Internet Explorer 9 Sun Spider

Introducing HTML5 By Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp (book)

Designing for HTML5 & CSS3 – Darren Wood

Deep Dive into HTML5

HTML5 and Internet Explorer 9 Demo Fest

http://www.orchardproject.net

Azure Storage Explorer

http://ietestdrive.com

http://youtube.com/html5

http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/jw-wmv-player

My Deployed Demo Sites

http://b.1tri.be – Demo site, HTML5 Video, IE9 site pin, MVC3 + Razor – Hosted on Windows Azure Extra Small Compute Instance

http://nigel.akl.co.nz – WebMatrix, MVC 3 + SQL Server hosted at http://thecloud.net.nz

http://nzigel.com – WebMatrix MVC3 + SQL CE 4 hosted on shared hosting environment in the USA

Demos

FishIE Tank

Graphics Acceleration (SVG)

Galactic

Master of the Web Game NZ

Way Out Wars Game

Canvas Pinball

Flickr Postcards

Canvas Zoom

Geolocation

http://foursquareplayground.com

Video Format Support

Firework (video mash up)

ESPN cricinfo

50+ Amazing Websites to visit on Internet Explorer 9

Resources for NZ WP7 Developers

nparker — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 01:56:26 GMT

I must admit there are some very nice apps starting to turn up in marketplace built by NZ devs. Some of my favourite of late include Gooseberry ( a winner in the Trade Me category of the NZ dev competition), the POQET Directory and Menu Mania. Out of the US I really rate RunKeeper, 4th & Mayor, Flickr and Chickens Can Dream.

Limit of Free Apps Raised to 100

We have raised the limit on the number of certifications that can be performed for FREE apps at no cost to the registered developer from five to 100. This was a common request from developers which we are glad to implement after building alternate methods to ensure that users can find and download high quality apps.

Windows Phone 7 Controls

Mindscape has released their suite of awesome Windows Phone 7 controls to much fanfare giving away 1000 free licenses!

Also telerik is working with Microsoft corp to give your user group $100USD if you use their stuff.

NZ Developer Apps

We have reached 76 applications in the marketplace built by New Zealand developers. I want to exceed 100 apps before the end of June. So if you are building an app using the awesome free tools contact me through this blog to request a token for a free developer marketplace account. I have a limited number of these available and I’ll need you to confirm that you live in New Zealand, and that your application is of decent quality and is nearing completion.

I’m looking forward to seeing the Kiwibank finder app that was built by Koshy John during his internship as part of Summer of Tech.

Unplugged Web Session

nparker — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 03:07:00 GMT

UPDATE: I have posted the slide deck and session videos to http://blogs.msdn.com/b/nigel/archive/2011/03/22/msdn-unplugged-the-unnamed-package-of-web-love.aspx

I delivered my first unplugged session this morning in Wellington on

Session 1: The Unnamed Package of Web Love
ASP.NET MVC3, Razor, Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate and emerging HTML5 capabilities (including the new <video/> tag) are providing exciting new ways to create and consume web content. Join Nigel Parker, technology evangelist at Microsoft, as he introduces these new web technologies and demonstrates some practical examples of how you can leverage them in your existing and future web application projects.

There is still time to register for the Dunedin, Hamilton and Auckland events.

As mentioned in my session I will post my links today (don’t look if you are coming to my session later in the week) and a video of the session next week.

Links:

Training Resources:

http://webcamps.ms – HOL’s, presentations and training

http://www.asp.net/mvc/pluralsight – Web Platform Video Training (free until March 18th)

http://microsoft/web (Web Platform Installer)

http://www.asp.net/WebMatrix

Windows Azure Free Trial

Windows Azure MSDN Benefits

How To Publish an ASP.NET MVC 3 App to Windows Azure

RC of Entity Framework 4.1 (which includes EF Code First)

HTML5 & CSS3 in Visual Studio 2010 SP1

Expression Web 4 SP1 – HTML5 / CSS3 Support

http://ie9.co.nz – Get IE9

ie9ify

IE9 Developer Tools: Network Tab

Comparing 3D Graphics Capabilities Of Internet Explorer 9 And Chrome 11

Chrome 10 vs. Internet Explorer 9 Sun Spider

Designing for HTML5 & CSS3 – Darren Wood

Deep Dive into HTML5

HTML5 and Internet Explorer 9 Demo Fest

http://www.orchardproject.net

Azure Storage Explorer

http://ietestdrive.com

http://youtube.com/html5

http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/jw-wmv-player

My Deployed Demo Sites

http://b.1tri.be – Demo site, HTML5 Video, IE9 site pin, MVC3 + Razor – Hosted on Windows Azure Extra Small Compute Instance

http://nigel.akl.co.nz – WebMatrix, MVC 3 + SQL Server hosted at http://thecloud.net.nz

http://nzigel.com – WebMatrix MVC3 + SQL CE 4 hosted on shared hosting environment in the USA

Demos

FishIE Tank

Graphics Acceleration (SVG)

Galactic

Master of the Web Game NZ

Way Out Wars Game

Canvas Pinball

Flickr Postcards

Canvas Zoom

Geolocation

http://foursquareplayground.com

Video Format Support

Firework (video mash up)

ESPN cricinfo

50+ Amazing Websites to visit on Internet Explorer 9

Also keep and eye on Mike’s blog for his session notes and demo’s as well.

UPDATE: I have posted the slide deck and session videos to http://blogs.msdn.com/b/nigel/archive/2011/03/22/msdn-unplugged-the-unnamed-package-of-web-love.aspx

MSDN Unplugged Developer Events Around New Zealand Next Week

nparker — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 04:17:34 GMT

I am hitting the road next week with Mike to present two developer sessions around the country.

As I wrote in last weeks’ MSDN Flash

In the first session, I will present on ASP.NET MVC3, Razor, Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate and emerging HTML5 capabilities. The second Mike Zeff will present on the new features in Windows Azure including how to use Windows Azure to compliment your mobile applications. Please register now to secure your place.

To tie in with the training we have a new Windows Azure introductory special that includes 750 free hours of a Windows Azure extra-small instance. We have also been working on a 30 day Azure Pass so you can try the Azure platform without the need for a credit card.Since demand is high worldwide for this offer, we will be giving out tokens at the sessions to access this service. If you live in Christchurch or another centre that we are not traveling to, please email us to request a token.

I hope to see you at the event.

The Mixing Room–Te Papa

nparker — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 00:01:00 GMT

Last week when I was down in Wellington for the ONYAs (Congratulations Keith!) I visited Te Papa to see The Mixing Room exhibition telling the stories of young refugees in New Zealand running from the 10th April 2010-2013.

For me this is the rewarding part of being a technology evangelist. This story started two years ago when I was building a demo for the WEB09 keynote in Auckland. The demo I gave inspired Te Papa’s interactive developer Tim Tait to attend a 3 1/2 Silverlight camp that I’d organised for Wellington. This lead to Tim learning Silverlight and making the following comment on his blog:

Before this week I had hardly touched Silverlight and now I don’t think I can live without it. Even though Silverlight is very different from Flash, I think having that Flash background let me pick it up fairly quickly.

Tim followed this training with his first Silverlight exhibition celebrating Kura Pounamu the Treasured stone of Aotearoa New Zealand (video). This lead to Tim’s latest exhibition:

The Mixing Room mosaic is projected 6 metres high within the exhibition and is made up of thousands of photographs taken of and by young refugees that have participated in The Mixing Room project. It will be updated throughout the duration of the exhibition. So why don’t you contribute?

Here is a video I shot as I experienced the exhibition. The stories are moving and the space draws you into the experiences of our newest New Zealanders.

Experience the online version of the mosaic:

Once again great work Tim and Te Papa.

NZ MSDN Flash: The Unnamed Package of Web Love

nparker — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 22:12:10 GMT

I have written the first MSDN Flash editorial of the year. Subscribe to the newsletter if you haven’t already.

24 January 2011 | Volume 1

Welcome back!
One thing I've learnt working for Microsoft is that the US doesn't shut down over the break. The web team in Redmond has been particularly busy releasing a bunch of new technologies at the recent CodeMash event earlier in the month.

So what did we release?
Last month we released the Beta of VS 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1). Included in this service pack is support for the new IIS Express 7.5 and tooling support for SQL CE 4. There are many more details on Scott Guthrie's blog and a great rollup of all the links.

How are we supporting the new web stuff that is coming through?
We shipped ASP.NET MVC 3. Included is a new additional view-engine called "Razor" and richer JavaScript scenarios that take advantage of emerging HTML5 capabilities. Check out this tutorial to teach you the basics.

Wow this is getting deep! How are you supporting the newbies?
In addition to all these great products we released WebMatrix. WebMatrix elegantly integrates IIS Express, SQL Compact and programming frameworks (ASP.NET and PHP) into a single, integrated experience. Laurence Moroney wrote a great tutorial for those who are new to Web development and want to get started with WebMatrix.

What about reference examples? I learn best when I have best practice code to learn from.
Have you seen the All-In-One Code Framework? It aims to be a one-stop experience for developers searching for and requesting code samples from Microsoft. Also we have Orchard (a free, open source, community based project) that provides Content Management System (CMS) and Blogging support out of the box. Orchard itself is built as an ASP.NET MVC 3 application using Razor view templates (and by default uses SQL CE 4 for data storage). Read these tutorials to learn more.

What about the Cloud? Isn't Microsoft "All In"?
Take a look at Deploying Orchard to Windows Azure and Steve Marx's post on how to deploy WebMatrix applications to Windows Azure. If you are an MSDN subscriber you can activate your Windows Azure platform benefits as well.

But you didn't mention Windows Phone 7!
Ok slightly off topic but because you asked for it, I have written a blog post on using Windows Azure with Windows Phone 7, HTML5 and iPhone.

Nigel Parker
Technology Evangelist
Microsoft New Zealand
Blog | Twitter | Email

Windows Azure Platform Discover Event
This one day event is specifically designed for Independent Software Venfors (ISVs) and software start ups interested in learning more about the Windows Azure Platform. In Auckland on Monday the 7th, and Wellington on Tuesday 8th of February.

MIX11 - Save US$500 + One Night Hotel Stay
MIX11 registration opens in late January with an early-bird special - register by February 11 to save US$500 on your conference pass. Join the MIX email newsletter to learn the full details of this early-bird special and other announcements.

New Zealand Visual Studio ALM Conference - Wellington, 6th & 7th April
Tickets are now on sale for New Zealand's premier event for software development teams. Come along and see leading international and local speakers present on a range of topics covering the full spectrum of Application Lifecycle Management. Choose from a number of post conference workshops but be quick to secure early bird rates to what promises to be an exciting event.

Using Windows Azure with Windows Phone 7, HTML5 and iPhone

nparker — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 20:43:23 GMT

Since the launch of Windows Phone 7 and while I was down at the iDev conference in Christchurch I am coming across more and more people that are looking for ways to create scalable backend services and sync solutions across a number of different client platforms. This got me thinking about what Windows Azure can potentially deliver to the solution.

The first area that perked my interest is the CTP of sync framework 4. This framework enables synchronization of data stored in SQL Azure to a range of different clients including Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, HTML5, iPhone and Android. Check out the videos Introduction to SQL Azure Data Sync and Building Offline Applications using Sync Framework and SQL Azure.

In addition to this Steve Marx presented a session at PDC titled Building Windows Phone 7 Applications with the Windows Azure Platform. He has written a blog post that shares his code to DoodleJoy, a Windows Azure application that hosts an OData service and a Windows Phone 7 application that consumes it.

Since having my Windows Phone 7 I have particularly enjoyed applications like AlphaJax that take advantage of the notification service on the device to let you know when your friends have played their turn. In order to leverage this functionality you require to deploy and host your own backend services. Windows Azure can be a good solution to hosting these kinds of services. Check out this article Windows Phone 7 – Toast Notification Using Windows Azure Cloud Service to find out more on how to do this.

It is great to see people starting to put all these pieces together. Jason Hunter from Gen-i took the challenge of scoping building and deploying an application for WP7 using Windows Azure over the holiday break. He writes about his experiences on his blog.

How can you get on Windows Azure?

Do you have a registered company that is:

Developing a software product or service?
Privately held?
Less than three years old?
Making less than US $1M annually?

If so, you may like to sign-up for Microsoft BizSpark (it’s free!)

If you are already an MSDN subscriber (either personally or through your companies partner benefits) you can activate your Windows Azure platform benefits valued at an estimated $1,800 USD per year per developer.

If you are not an MSDN subscriber there is a free introduction offer to try Windows Azure to dip your toes in.

Update - Mary Jo Foley wrote:

Microsoft Research has made available for download a developer preview of its Windows Phone 7 + Cloud Services Software Development Kit (SDK).

The new SDK is related to Project Hawaii, a mobile research initiative which I’ve blogged about before. Hawaii is about using the cloud to enhance mobile devices. The “building blocks” for Hawaii applications/services include computation (Windows Azure); storage (Windows Azure); authentication (Windows Live ID); notification; client-back-up; client-code distribution and location (Orion).

The SDK is “for the creation of Windows Phone 7 (WP7) applications that leverage research services not yet available to the general public,” read more…

Looking Back Over the Last 100+ Days

nparker — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 23:08:00 GMT

Today is my last day acting in the team lead role and I want to share some of the insights and experiences that I have had over the last 100+ days. Microsoft has phenomenal development programmes and fantastic people that make it truly a great place to work and grow. As suggested during our leadership offsite “These are the Good Old Days”.

I wrote the poem below, when I was 22. I had just left the company that I started at university and was learning to snowboard during a backpacking holiday across Canada. At the time I didn’t realize I was transitioning but I was trying to free myself from a structured path to plan a future that I was passionate about.

30 days into the new role I was encouraged to read a book titled The First 90 Days.

The First 90 Days provides a framework for transition acceleration that will help leaders diagnose their situations, craft winning transition strategies, and take charge quickly.

There were some real gems in this book the conceptual backbone of the book outlines the ten key challenges when starting a new role.

Promote yourself. Perhaps the biggest pitfall you face is assuming that what made you successful to date will continue to do so. Take a mental break from your old job and prepare to take charge in the new one.
Accelerate your learning. Getting acquainted with a new role can feel like drinking from the fire hose. Be systematic & focused about what and how you choose to learn.
Match strategy to situation. Diagnose the business situation accurately and clarify the challenges and opportunities. STARS model
1. Start-up – you assemble the capabilities to get a new business off the ground
2. Turnaround – you take a unit that is recognized to be in trouble and work to get it back on track
3. Realignment – your challenge is to revitalize a unit that is drifting into trouble
4. Sustaining-Success – you are shouldering responsibility for preserving the vitality of a successful organisation
Secure early wins. Early winds build credibility and create momentum.
Negotiate success. You need to build a productive working relationship with your new boss. This means planning a series of critical conversations about the situation, expectations, style, resources and personal development.
Achieve alignment. The higher you rise the more you play the role of organization architect.
Build your team. evaluate team members. You need to be systematic and strategic in approaching the team building challenge.
Create coalitions. Supportive alliances, both internal and external are necessary.
Keep your balance. Preserve your ability to make good judgements
Expedite everyone. Help everyone in your organization accelerate their own transitions.

Reading through the Corporate Athlete got me back to the gym two days a week.

Executives are, in effect, "corporate athletes." If they are to perform at high levels over the long haul, they must train in the systematic, multilevel way that athletes do. Rooted in two decades of work with world-class athletes, the integrated theory of performance management addresses the body, the emotions, the mind, and the spirit through a model the authors call the performance pyramid. At its foundation is physical well-being. Above that rest emotional health, then mental acuity, and, finally, a spiritual purpose. Each level profoundly influences the others, and all must be addressed together to avoid compromising performance. Rigorous exercise, for instance, can produce a sense of emotional well-being, clearing the way for peak mental performance.

Mat opened my eyes to the motivating factors for technical people

Once we have enough money technical people are driven fundamentally by challenge mastery & making a contribution.

When the Profit motive gets unmoored from the purpose motive, bad things happen.

The company that is called out in the video has an interesting piece in last month’s CIO magazine (20 Oct 2010) - Atlassian showcases the value of innovation.

I learnt from Outliers and What the Dog Saw

Specifically, are smart people overrated? the story of the minor geniuses, the underdogs and the overlooked.

I was particularly engaged by the 10,000 hours to mastery and The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable stories.

I spent a day learning the Situational Leadership Theory

The fundamental underpinning of the Situational Leadership Theory is there is no single "best" style of leadership. Effective leadership is task-relevant and that the most successful leaders are those that adapt their leadership style to the Maturity ("the capacity to set high but attainable goals, willingness and ability to take responsibility for the task, and relevant education and/or experience of an individual or a group for the task) of the individual or group they are attempting to lead/influence. That effective leadership varies, not only with the person or group that is being influenced, but it will also depend on the task, job or function that needs to be accomplished.

David Rayner presented our leadership team this little gem from TED - How complexity leads to simplicity

At the iPhone developers conference I was enthralled by Rowan Simpson’s Start-up Lesson’s presentation.

1. Team. In spite of the “lone hero / inventor” myth, the reality is that it takes a wide range of skills to build an idea into a product, and a product into a business. Developers, designers, marketing experts, leaders, strategists, operational folks. Surround yourself with the right people for you and for your venture.
2. Iterate. That amazing lightning flash moment of inspiration and invention? Sorry, its a myth. Most start-ups iterate, so be ready for your Big Idea to evolve. Build it, launch it quick, get people using it… remember: ‘If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.’ (Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn)
3. Executed & Networked. Isolation and secrecy have no place in the successful start-up world. Your idea doesn’t have to be original, you don’t need to run around with NDA’s, you just need to have a compelling product or service that solves a customer’s pain. Get it out of the shed! Use your networks! If you have a remarkable solution to a real need, it’ll go viral, and that’s the best way to ensure:
4. Build Momentum. Um, well, be ready for this to take longer than you think. Trade Me’s “overnight success” took 7 years. Remember that your early audience may be different from your mass market. Again, be ready to adapt your business & product to meet market needs. The key thing here is to get early sales, and continue the growth momentum. One approach is to set clear goals – have a number to obsess about. Measure the right things, and focus on optimising everything about your start-up. Find that 1 number and obsess over it. For Trade Me it was the number of reseller accounts.
5. Smart Money. Yes, sometimes a buyer comes along with a big chequebook… but it’s a tough journey for lots of entrepreneurs. The key is to find an investor that recognises the value of your business model and the growth trajectory, and that you’ll add value to their business or investment portfolio.
6. Stay Passionate. How’s this for a reality check:

Rowan recommended two books during his talk which both look like interesting holiday reading.

Then this morning on my final day in the office acting in the lead role Harvard Business Review has released a brand new study titled

Managing Yourself: Stop Holding Yourself Back

This research identifies five major barriers stopping people from becoming exceptional leaders and is well worth a read:

Barrier 1: Overemphasizing Personal Goals. True leadership is about making other people better as a result of your presence—and making sure your impact endures in your absence. The decision to focus on others can feel dangerous. It forces you to take your eyes off your own welfare and to stop scanning the horizon for predators. Risk aversion is a protective mechanism wired into our DNA; that’s why security concerns generally trump impact.
Barrier 2: Protecting Your Public Image. Another common impediment to leadership is being overly distracted by your image—that ideal self you’ve created in your mind. Sticking to the script that goes along with that image takes a lot of energy, leaving little left over for the real work of leadership.
Barrier 3: Turning Competitors into Enemies. One particularly toxic behaviour is the act of turning those you don’t get along with into two-dimensional enemies. Distorting other people is a common response to conflict, but it carries significant leadership costs. It severs your links to reality, making you reliably incapable of exerting influence. As you turn others into caricatures, you risk becoming a caricature yourself.
Barrier 4: Going It Alone. Most people opt out of leadership for perfectly good reasons. The road, by definition, is unsafe. It leads to change, not comfort.
Barrier 5: Waiting for Permission. Like risk aversion, patience can be a valuable evolutionary gift. It’s a main ingredient in discipline and hope. It helps us uncover the root cause of problems. It keeps us from hurting someone at the DMV. But patience can be a curse for emerging leaders. It can undermine our potential by persuading us to keep our heads down and soldier on, waiting for someone to recognize our efforts and give us the proverbial tap on the shoulder—a better title and formal authority.

It has been a fantastic opportunity to change and I wish all of you considering changes over this holiday period to take that first step and discover that you don’t know what you don’t know.

Merry Christmas

The Technology Behind Cricket an NV Interactive Story

nparker — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 00:06:08 GMT

It is well known that I love my cricket and over the last few years I’ve been able to combine my passion for cricket with the awesome team at NV Interactive in Christchurch and New Zealand cricket.

NV Interactive (then Lupo Data Concepts) was in 2005 one of the first companies worldwide to build a Smart Client solution with Visual Studio 2005 for scoring cricket matches. The team developed a bespoke application that feeds real-time scoring information into the Cricinfo.com website which on a monthly basis logs > 100 million page views. The site can easily log over a million users in a day if there's a big game on, making it one of the biggest sports websites in the world. Read the case study that we put together 5 years ago and NV Interactive’s summary of events.

Last year Justin Vaughan (CEO of NZ Cricket) reached out to Kevin Ackhurst (then Microsoft NZ GM) to deliver an "envisioning workshop" at New Zealand Cricket with Microsoft Gold Partner NV Interactive. I attended the workshop and collectively we mapped out a bunch of projects that we could take on collectively.

In March last year NV launched a new BLACKCAPS website based around domestic and international live scoring.

A key point of difference of the New Zealand Cricket website is its Live Scoring feature. The site is the only provider of live scoring ball by ball for all domestic games, and also provides live scoring for all international matches. It was essential in the redevelopment that NV create a very stable and secure platform that could cope with the huge volume of traffic during matches. Up to 15,000 kiwi fans visit the site at any given time for the live scoring statistics for as many as 5 matches a day

The video highlights area has become a new fan-favourite, and has enabled New Zealand Cricket to leverage their rights relationships with their core coverage supplier, Sky Sports, in a new and creative way.

In Feb this year on the eve of the Australia cricket tour of NZ NV Interactive launched the new NZC Match Centre to “live score” all of the local domestic and international cricket matches in a single place. You can access the match centre here.

In March Gus from NV Interactive came up to Las Vegas with me for the MIX conference. In our hotel room after Day 1 of MIX Gus and I had an hour to kill for dinner. 20 minutes later we’d managed to port the existing NZ Cricket Match Centre to Windows Phone 7 the day that the tools were released!

The NZ Herald followed this up with a great interview with Gus.

Following that earlier this year when I was down in Christchurch I got talking again with Gus and Zach about the then soon to be released Silverlight Pivot control and how we could look at using some of the stats that are collected by NZ Cricket. It was over that beer that we devised a plan to build the world’s first video pivot unlocking all the short video clicks capturing every 4, 6 and wicket from every home international over the last 5 years.

At the time I was also planning the keynote for Tech.Ed to present a real world demo of many screens and a cloud in conjunction with Sky TV for live streaming and instant sport highlights. Delivering this keynote and live on stage announcing the BLACKCAPS video vault was certainly a highlight for me this year.

Read the NV Press release.

Last week the innovation and awesomeness of this “world’s first” project was honoured by receiving two final spots at the upcoming ONYA web awards.

Fast forward to now and once again NV Interactive has a new technology release to tie in with the start of the NZ International cricket season on boxing day against the touring Pakistani team.

I am happy to announce today that NZ Cricket have released a mobile application for Windows Phone 7 that consolidates News, Live scoring (domestic & international matches), Point Tables and International Video Highlights of all the key match moments (added at midnight the day of the match).

As part of a series profiling NZ Windows Phone 7 application developers and kiwi Start-ups Ben Gracewood has today posted a video interviewing Zach Hitchcock about the development of the application.

All that is left now is for the BLACKCAPS to show some form and win the 20/20 against Pakistan at Eden Park on boxing day. I’ll be there cheering them on.

Update: The Cricket Company on SKY Sport did a story on NV Interactive

In this same episode there was a piece on Animation Research Limited and their Virtual Eye technology that is being used by SKY Sport during the test.

I worked with Ian Taylor and the ARL team during the Louis Vuitton Pacific Series in Auckland in 2009 and I have a lot of respect for the ground that they have broken with their 3D on screen graphics.

The ICC have chosen not to use the technology as an Umpire Decision Review System during the test despite it being available a point that was presented on 3 news last night.